Described as ‘one of the civilising forces of the Western imagination’, Raphael the multimedia man breathes life into a new exhibition.

Artists are not expected, these days, to be role models: that is left to sportspeople. Things were different in the Victorian era when art was meant to convey moral lessons – an idea that trickled through to Protestant England from the Counter-Reformation.

It was the Council of Trent in 1563 that first promoted the idea of art as a form of spiritual education but Raphael (1483-1520) was the first to embody the ideal of the moral artist. In his 1969 BBC series Civilisation, Kenneth Clark described him as “one of the civilising forces of the Western imagination” – a view with which Matthias Wivel, co-curator of the National Gallery’s new exhibition celebrating the quincentenary of the artist’s death, concurs. “Raphael’s art offers in its very form an ideal projection of Western civilisation, a mirror in which we see the better angels of our nature,” he writes in the catalogue.

Whether imagination can be civilised is open to debate, but Raphael certainly excelled at envisioning angels, from the fluttering seraphs holding chalices to catch Christ’s blood in The Mond Crucifixion (c.1502-03) to the divine messenger taking a flying leap from the dome of the Chigi Chapel in S. Maria del Popolo in a beautiful preparatory drawing of 1515. Named after an archangel himself, he was credited with an angelic temperament by his influential first biographer Vasari, who set him up as the antithesis to the surly Michelangelo. “He was by nature … blessed with natural, gentle humanity,” Vasari wrote in his Lives of the Artists published 30 years after Raphael’s death. “He was Nature’s gift to the world. Having been conquered by the art of Michelangelo Buonarroti, it wished to be vanquished by art coupled with moral habits.”